I. Field
The following description relates generally to wireless communications, and more particularly to accommodating narrowband and wideband communication devices in a wireless communication environment.
II. Background
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication; for instance, voice and/or data may be provided via such wireless communication systems. A typical wireless communication system, or network, can provide multiple users access to one or more shared resources. For instance, a system may use a variety of multiple access techniques such as Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM), Time Division Multiplexing (TDM), Code Division Multiplexing (CDM), Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), and others.
Common wireless communication systems employ one or more base stations that provide a coverage area. A typical base station can transmit multiple data streams for broadcast, multicast and/or unicast services, wherein a data stream may be a stream of data that can be of independent reception interest to a wireless terminal. A wireless terminal within the coverage area of such base station can be employed to receive one, more than one, or all the data streams carried by the composite stream. Likewise, a wireless terminal can transmit data to the base station or another wireless terminal.
Each wireless terminal can communicate with one or more base stations via transmissions on forward and reverse links. The forward link (or downlink) refers to the communication link from base stations to wireless terminals, and the reverse link (or uplink) refers to the communication link from wireless terminals to base stations. According to an example, a wireless communication system can leverage a frequency band within a wireless spectrum for communicating via the forward and/or reverse links. Further to this example, in a wideband wireless communication system, wireless terminals oftentimes decode all channels within the frequency band utilized for downlink transmission by base stations. However, conventional techniques can be inefficient since some of the wireless terminals can operate over a smaller bandwidth (e.g., for voice related communication); thus, decoding the entire frequency band (e.g., all channels over which a base station sends information) can waste processing power of these wireless terminals. Moreover, some wireless terminals (e.g., wireless terminals with lesser capabilities) can decode a portion of the frequency band rather than the frequency band in its entirety, and therefore, such wireless terminals that operate over a smaller frequency range commonly can be unsupported by typical wideband wireless communication systems.